How to Harness Your Creativity

What's up, everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder’s Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product. Today, I am talking about why creativity is a timeless skill we all should develop. Let's hop into it. 

3 reasons creativity is important

So if you don't know this about me, I am naturally a creative, which is kind of ironic since, you know, I built a business media brand, worked in finance and sales and trading before, but I've been creative my whole life. In kindergarten I was so proud about making a two-in-one pen and highlighter where I sawed the pen and the highlighter, secured them together back-to-back with tape. I thought I was basically Isaac Newton. In third grade, I bought doodling books to learn how to be an amazing doodler. In college, I started writing a business newsletter because I thought business news was dry. That turned into Morning Brew. And to this day I keep a waterproof notepad in the shower so I could write down my craziest ideas if inspiration hits me. And I put this on Twitter, and I think a ton of people bought the product, so I'm actually going to share the link to the waterproof notebook or notepad in the show notes in case you want to have one in your shower as well. All that to say, I love everything about being creative, the satisfaction of wrestling with my imagination, the possibilities that are created by thinking outside of the box. But aside from my own love for the craft, I think that it is one of the most important skills that we can develop as professionals and as people. I want to tell you why. 

#1: Creativity is problem solving

First reason creativity is so important is it's just a synonym for problem solving. Creativity is the tool that gets you through tough situations. So to nerd out for a second, I've been loving the show called The Witcher. And in the show, one of the main characters has the power to open a portal that takes you far away from where you currently are. And she pretty much exclusively opens these portals when she’s stuck in a really shitty situation and doesn't have any options. In my mind, creativity is that portal for professionals and people.One example for you. So there's an episode of the show How I Built This that I will never forget. And a moment that is etched into my brain is in the episode with Spanx and Sara Blakely, where Sarah finally gets her brand into a big name department store, which happened by Neiman Marcus. And she quickly became disenfranchised by the fact that her clothing rack that had all of her Spanx stacked on it was placed in the back of the store where there was no foot traffic, so the odds that she was going to be able to move product was very low. And she knew that this was her one chance to prove to a retailer that her product could sell. And so she took matters into her own hands. Every day, she would go to Neiman Marcus and she would move the products rack from the back of the store, to the front of the store by the register. And for days, employees would see the rack. They would know it was in the wrong place and they would move it back to the back of the store. Finally, after enough times of doing this, Sarah tricked, the store into keeping Spanx’s rack by the register where tons of foot traffic would be. While this isn't creativity in the traditional sense, when you think of whiteboards and brainstorms, it is the true essence of the word. Creativity is the use of the imagination or original ideas. And in this context, it is using your imagination or your original ideas to will a business into existence. 

#2: Creativity is the source of all progress

The second reason creativity is so important is because it is the source of all progress. Effort and execution allow us to move forward in life in a straight line. And that is great. It is actually a necessity, but it keeps us on a two-dimensional plane. To move three dimensionally, to truly offer ourselves many different directions for how we can push life forward, creativity is the crystal key. And Tim Urban, who's the now-famous writer of Wait But Why, an amazing blog. He has this great way of illustrating my thoughts around this. He has a famous tweet where he basically visualizes you when you were born, all of the paths, you could have gone down throughout life, the path you actually chose to go down, and now where you are today with all of your possible paths ahead of you. And the main point that Tim makes in this diagram is that far too often, we look back at all of the doors we closed in our life, and we don't look enough at the doors that are open in front of us from this point moving forward. But I think a more nuanced and even a more powerful point in Tim Urban’s diagram is that all of these future paths that we have at our fingertips, they all come from creativity. Creativity is being stuck in a job you don't love and thinking through all of your options from most obvious to least obvious, whether it's a lateral move an uncomfortable-but-potential-breakthrough conversation with your boss, starting a consultancy, going back to school, looking for a new job, becoming a creator on the internet, applying to a startup accelerator. Are all of your options original this example? No, not necessarily, but they are original to you. And creativity allows you to go from a closed scarcity mindset to one of abundance.

#3: Creativity compounds

The third reason creativity is so important is because creativity compounds. The vast majority of thoughts we have and ideas we come up with are by definition not creative in the sense that they are unoriginal, which is why true creativity, true original ideas, move people in such a big way. Original ideas act as Lego blocks that people will share and then add their own spin to, clicking their Lego block on top of yours. Packy McCormick, who is a friend and the writer of Not Boring, has an awesome way to think about this.

Packy McCormick sound bite:  Ideas compoundability is under-appreciated because it's hard to measure a trace, but idea compoundability is one of the main contributors to all of the progress and speed we're experiencing. Ideas are building on each other more quickly than ever before, too. We've only had access to the world's knowledge at our fingertips for like 20 years. And that's practical knowledge like mathematical equations or safes or lectures, but it's also inspirational knowledge. Whenever a person or group of people does something, the rest of humanity knows that that thing is possible within minutes. It wouldn't make any sense for that access to knowledge and inspiration not to result in progressively more spectacular results.

Alex Lieberman: Basically what Packy is saying is similar to how open-source software was a boon for technology because developers now had a foundation of code that they could build new software on top of. Original knowledge, AKA creativity, creates a foundation for all of us to build our own ideas on top of. And we've seen this play out in real life with tons of great thinkers, especially one like Naval Ravikant.

Naval Ravikant has become such a big name on the internet with more than a million Twitter followers, not because of his business success, which is amazing in its own, right, but because of his prolific ideas and content creation. Naval has always said that he'll keep his content free because he sees the value of compounding that Packy talks about. A book has even been written, curating all of Naval’s best ideas, his tweets constantly go viral and get shared across the internet. And right now on this episode, I'm talking about the power of his creativity. Creativity compounds, and now in the era of social media and the meme, creativity can travel faster than ever before.

Bonus reason: Tech can’t automate creativity (yet)

Now, one final reason creativity is so damn important, and that is the impact of technology on society. The more executional the job, the faster that technology will eat it. The more creative the job, the slower that technology will eat it. Technology thrives when tasks are repeatable, predictable, and learnable, but because creativity is truly original work, it is very, very hard to teach technology to be creative. Is it possible? Yeah, I think it is. Will it take a long time? Yeah, I also think so. 

Recap

So to recap, creativity is more important than ever before. It is a timeless skill. It's a tool to break through seemingly unsurmountable obstacles. It turns life into a three-dimensional experience from a two-dimensional one. Creativity compounds much like muddy or open source software. And creativity is the best offense against the acceleration of technology. 

I want to hear from you

Now, I would love to hear from you. Over the weekend, I caught up on more than 700 emails from Founder’s Journal listeners. Getting these emails literally made my weekend, and I would love to get to know so many of you. If you haven't yet shot me an email, introduce yourself, send me an email at alex@morningbrew.com and tell me who you are and why it is that you listen to the show. And while you do that, please subscribe to Founder’s Journal and leave a review on the podcast player of your choice, whether it's Apple, Spotify, or any other. It is the number one way that we grow the show. It's the number one way that we get to the top of the charts. And it's how new people find out about Founder’s Journal and join the community. Thank you so much for listening and I'll catch you next episode.